OT - Re: mtv europe (was: learn to play website)

Duncan - wow you've indeed raised the baby over there. My day gig for all my years in NY has been a computer tech and I was a contractor (help desk/field support) and eventual employee at MTV and VIacom properties 94-95, 96, 2000 & 2001-2. Saw it when it was more fun before the CBS merger and saw Europe/Asia grow. Miss it a lot but for IT stuff stability was the weak link. Every couple of years Tom Freston and other upper mgt would get restless and decide to oursource to IBM and away my dept would go until they got fed up with IBM's screwy support and brought us back, hence the revolving door. I probably know some folks you know and should probably take this off list for further. Sounds like it's pretty cool ops in Europe with them.

>> I worked contract for MTV in NY all through the 90's and recall when Europe was just getting launched. Kind of a blast to see your corp disclaimer... <<

jim- I started here back in 1992, when it was still a toddler- one mtv channel for the whole of europe & africa. launched august 1987.

we started to divide the service by territory for the usual commercial reasons (targeted advertising/airtime sales, then regionalised programming) & launched a whole raft of other viacom channels too, like nickelodeon, paramount, VH-1, MTV-2, showtime & so on, in many different flavours for different countries.

most of them play out from london, but there are also now playout centres in milan, berlin & amsterdam, & "franchise" operations all over the eastern bloc countries.

some of the channels are run in partnership with the local platform operators (e.g. nick & paramount are in partnership with sky in the UK).

some of the european channels were originally independents that we bought up & kept their branding as it was (e.g. TMF, viva).

most of the european services take quite a bit of US-content & re-version it somehow. there are different broadcast regulations prevalent in different territories, covering such stuff as ad-break structure (number, duration, distance apart), product-placement, certain kinds of content or topics.

in any case, the music bed often has to be changed because of rights issues. then the show might have to be re-voiced &/or subtitled after all this post-production. this all assumes that we can get hold of a suitable "kit of parts" from NY, as opposed to the finished, mixed US-domestic version of a show. & each channel (each mtv, VH-1, nick, paramount, whatever) has it's own idiosyncratic issues.

(& so e.g. I found myself in an audio studio in tel aviv where they were auditioning for the part of the israeli voice-artists for "spongebob". I was there to do due-diligence on the various 3rd parties dealing with nick-israel & discovered that the lead singer of "rockfour", an israeli prog band I like, was up for the title role....)

my job, having started off as a shift-based support techie, is now what one might call "business engineering"; I am trying to rationalise these processes & eliminate duplicate effort & resource-wastage. so.... tapeless workflows, shared media libraries, video-over-IP, best-practice video & audio compression techniques, WAN acceleration, this sort of thing.

phew!

what did you do in NY?

duncan.

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